Although potential immigrants had an opportunity to migrate abroad, some gradually become disenchanted with the future life they envisioned they would have in countries of immigration. Synthesizing their narratives illuminates a common sequence of processes, with immigrants first becoming bored and disappointed with a host society unlike what they had envisioned, then frustrated with the language barrier and sentiments of cultural alienation due to their unfamiliarity with cultural references, customs, and norms. Then even after they culturally assimilate, aspiring immigrants encounter both racial discrimination that they perceive as hostile and local gender norms that make it difficult to find a stable relationship. After working for several years, they gradually become aware of how they are unable to advance their career within their job as an immigrant. The social forces and restrictive immigration policies discussed earlier can lead aspiring immigrants to cut their losses from their immigration project out of the belief they will have a happier life as an ex-immigrant in their homeland than “just an immigrant.”

This chapterexamines whether and how sudden and unexpected shocks at the micro level, meso level, and macro level trigger disenchantment by depriving ex-immigrants of feeling sufficiently ontologically grounded, secure, and stable in their pursuit of mobility within host societies. Micro-level shocks like relationship break-ups or a friend or family member suddenly becoming seriously ill or dying and often do lead to immigrants giving up. Macro-shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic induced so much suffering across the entire population and therefore substantially reduces an immigrants’ networks of social support from anyone who could help them cope with a loss of ontological security. A meso-level shock designed to drive away migrants – the spike of violent physical and verbal hate crimes against immigrants of East Asian origin in Western societies since 2020 that demanded that they go back to their country of origin – paradoxically led them to acculturate into a migrant-destination society more rapidly and therefore did not lead to disenchantment with immigration.

The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the oldest UN human rights treaty, and for over forty years, the Committee overseeing its implementation, CERD, has had the power to decide individual communications. Despite this long history, a settled evidentiary framework has not materialised yet. The Committee rarely discussed evidence, and when it did, the results could differ markedly: In Dawas and Shava v. Denmark (2012), a case on mob violence, the Committee did not directly engage with the evidence, which led to a resurfacing of evidentiary questions during the follow-up phase, when they could no longer be addressed. Far preferable is the approach adopted in Zapescu v. Moldova (2021), dealing with discriminatory employment practices, where the Committee discussed the standard of proof for procedural violations and the necessary evidence. More elaborations of this kind are needed for a clear evidentiary pathway to emerge.

This chapter examines experiences of racial discrimination faced by Asian American families during the COVID-19 pandemic. Grounded in historical and sociopolitical contexts, it explores how the pandemic served as a flashpoint that intensified anti-Asian racism through structural, interpersonal, and digital channels. The authors present an integrated developmental and intersectional framework to analyze how racism impacted youth identity, mental health, family dynamics, and academic outcomes. Emphasis is placed on vicarious and direct discrimination, collective racism, and internalized bias, as well as coping strategies and resilience factors such as ethnic and racial socialization and civic engagement. The role of key microsystems – families, schools, neighborhoods, and digital spaces – is discussed. The chapter highlights ethnic, generational, and socioeconomic diversity within Asian American communities and the differential effects of racism across these lines. It concludes by identifying gaps in current research, calling for longitudinal, context-sensitive studies, and offering policy and intervention recommendations to support the well-being of Asian American youth.

Chapter 1 examines how companies engaged in forms of race-conscious image construction in an earlier context. The chapter first describes early federal government efforts in the 1940s that, while mostly unsuccessful, laid the groundwork nonetheless for the version of race-conscious image construction that companies undertook in the 1960s, including the systematic disclosure of information demonstrating attention to addressing racial segregation and discrimination before the advent of digital print and online disclosures. It explores partnerships between the federal government and companies during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, showing how the processes employed through this program helped corporations to establish their public images on race at the time. The chapter establishes that there was already a pattern, before 2020, for companies to use disclosures about race in ways that serve their own financial and reputational interests.

Chapter 4 offers larger excursions into other concepts and ideas that have been discussed in the context of African American or Black Psychology for decades. Among other things, it goes back to W. E. B. Du Bois, but also to more controversial concepts such as that of the ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’. The consequences of racism are given a great deal of coverage. The relevant research on the disadvantages and inequalities of African American communities is discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on cultural mistrust and medical mistrust, the latter of which stands in the way of epidemiological research. The positive value orientations of Afrocentrism and associated Black Psychology identity studies are a preparation for the presentation of the remedies, which include empowerment, storytelling, and counter-narratives. All of this has a broad basis in the work of African-American expert authors.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the concepts of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. It begins with a discussion of the American Dream, the notion that the US is a land of opportunity, equality, and the rule of law, and that anyone can be successful if they work hard. This notion of the American Dream is challenged by evidence and discussed from the perspective of Naima Coster, a Black Latina award-winning author. The chapter reviews some characteristics of minoritized communities in the US, how they experience discrimination and barriers to achieve the dream, and some popular myths about racial/gender progress. The chapter defines Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, issues at the heart of demands to make the dream true. Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion represent a growing field of research, a set of initiatives, and social movements to rethink power asymmetries, how resources and opportunities are distributed, and why social hierarchies are maintained. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on college student debt and the cycle of poverty. It ends with a discussion of Naima Coster, tokenism, and the need for structural change.

Like many Americans, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew overestimates the significance of disciplined saving and financial literacy in determining one’s wealth status. While it is true that households accumulate wealth either from help from family, saving some of their current income, or realizing gains from appreciating assets, it is important to understand the circumstances in which households find themselves.

Economic orthodoxy insists that wealth accumulation follows a life cycle pattern. Interested in maintaining a high but stable level of consumption, households dissave when young as they invest in their education, save prodigiously during midlife in anticipation of retirement, and then dissipate their wealth as they approach death. In this view, wealth is seen merely as a store of future consumption.

Yet, wealth is a source of power. Its possession allows one to avoid unexpected harm, take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, influence public policy, and assure the prospects of one’s offspring. The Wealth Privilege model insists that holding wealth makes it easier to accumulate more wealth, whether through saving, asset appreciation, or family transfers. It predicts that a system of wealth disparities is fully capable of promoting economic stratification as wealth is transferred across generations.

Appellate court opinions are often criticized for establishing difficult precedent as a result of imperfect reasoning.This chapter, inspired by Giambattista Vico, explores the role that prerational judgment, embodied in the sensus communis, plays in the authoring of what will become unintentionally difficult precedent, using Schuette v. BAMN (2014) and its relevant precedent as an example. In Schuette the Court ruled that a voter-approved constitutional amendment that removed the power to implement affirmative action plans was not an Equal Protection violation. The chapter argues that in the opinions that preceded Schuette, the Court was accustomed to the evils the majority could undertake to preserve white dominance and maintain the status quo. Those Courts could not have anticipated the extent to which the future Court would understand that dynamic as a problem of another time. Further, it demonstrates how critics of that precedent similarly fail to account for the role of sensus communis in those earlier cases (and in their own appraisal of them) through their insistence that those opinions should have anticipated the controversies and the shifts in language that accompanied them.

This chapter explores the concept of vulnerability, its recognition and use in international human rights law, and the broader debate on the (potential) advantages and downsides of focusing on vulnerable identities to strengthen protection. Following this overview, it examines core categories of vulnerability that are either already reflected in international human rights law, largely in the form of anti-discrimination instruments, or constitute a priority area in recent debates and legal developments. This includes ‘race’, gender and sexual orientation, persons with disabilities, persons living in extreme poverty, age (the rights of children are addressed in a discreet chapter), as well as refugees, migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs). For each of these categories, the chapter examines core notions, highlights specific concerns, charts relevant legal developments and analyses both advancements made and remaining challenges.

Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

Japanese occupation of British Asia challenged British prestige at an unprecedented scale, but what the War challenged about Britishness went far beyond the myth of white supremacy. This chapter explains how the Second World War shattered the cosmopolitan, inclusive notions of Britishness that developed in pre-war Hong Kong. Even before the outbreak of war, systemic discrimination involved in the 1940 evacuation scheme made colonial subjects realize that Britishness was reduced to a ‘race’ at moments of crisis. The chapter also explored the varied wartime experience of Portuguese refugees in Macau, students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and members of the British Army Aid Group (B.A.A.G.). Increased interactions with the British state made some acutely aware of the racism they experienced under British colonialism, and eroded their identification with Britishness. The practicalities of war, then, highlighted the fragility of the rhetoric of imperial cosmopolitanism, and put the diverse forms of Britishness articulated in pre-war Hong Kong to a severe test.

This chapter discusses the direct effects of racial discrimination on Black Americans’ health. It begins by documenting that daily exposure to the various forms of racial discrimination is a common experience for Black people living in the United States. Encountering racial discrimination creates stress, which activates physiological stress responses – bodily systems that normally provide person with the energy needed to rapidly reduce the stress. However, the stress created by racial discrimination is usually chronic because many Black Americans repeatedly experience racial discrimination over a prolonged period of time. When the bodily systems activated by stress response remain active, it creates a harmful physical condition – allostatic overload. Allostatic overload is responsible for a host of physical illnesses, including heart diseases, diabetes, and immune disorders. It is also associated with poorer mental health, as well as alterations in epigenetics, such as premature aging. Chronic stress can also cause people to engage in behaviors that may provide short-term emotional relief from discrimination-related stress but are unhealthy, such as drug use or eating certain unhealthy “comfort” foods. In sum, prolonged exposure to racial discrimination is a chronic stressor that threatens the health of Black Americans.

Experimental data, observational data, and analyses using automatic association data show that the manager–worker racial identity match influences hiring, pay, and access to managerial resources. Explanations of racial inequality in labor market outcomes depend on the wage–productivity relationship. The manager–worker racial identity match may affect productivity and wages in two ways: managers may use higher pay and better promotion opportunities to raises the productivity and wages of own-group workers; and, managers provide time, assistance, or other resources to own group workers and thereby increase their productivity, employment stability, and opportunities for promotion. Stratification economists link persistent discrimination to job competition. Equally skilled workers may receive different pay for doing the same work because they are employed at firms that are differentiated by the capacity to pay and by the capacity of workers to make firms pay. Equally skilled workers who perform the same job at firms with less competitive characteristics, or who are part of a workforce with lower bargaining power, will receive lower pay.